Re: FreeBSD on a Mac Mini Intel?
On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, Tom Marchand wrote: snip Ian, You could always test it using VMWare Fusionand then let us know Er, Gee thanks. I'll just have a word with the VMware guys about fully abastracting the mini in software... back in a jiffy ;-) Actually VMWare has a Mac Version which is what the poster was probably referring to. ___ FreeBSD 6.x installs and runs well as far as I can tell on VM-Ware Fusion. This I Have done but I don't recall any specifics. I'm pretty sure I tried 6.1 and 6.3 but I forget which processor (amd64 vs i386). However personal preference: I'd rather run the box native FreeBSD and not have to bother with Mac OS X. I was actually musing that this (VM) might be a nice way to pre-install a complete custom system. Install, configure, add packages, tweak your fav kernel stuff, etc then dump/restore to a real disk and pop in to a physical system. I used to so something like this with NeXT systems. Twerked good. It all sounds promising enough to buy a new toy. I'll let you all know real soon now if/how I get it running. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD on a Mac Mini Intel?
On Mon, 24 Nov 2008, Andrew Gould wrote: On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 9:08 AM, John Almberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Nov 21, 2008, at 11:42 PM, Ian Jefferson wrote: Is anyone running FreeBSD on a Mac Mini Intel? Ian, You could always test it using VMWare Fusionand then let us know ;-) Er, Gee thanks. I'll just have a word with the VMware guys about fully abastracting the mini in software... back in a jiffy ;-) Ok any comment about other low power platforms? I'm sorely tempted to just buy one (mini-intel) and promise to write up the results on some web page somewhere. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
FreeBSD on a Mac Mini Intel?
Is anyone running FreeBSD on a Mac Mini Intel? I've looked around for a definitive discussion on the topic but couldn't find anything on this list or Google at least. I'd like to replace a couple of relatively high power-consuming servers with a couple of Mac Mini Intel's. For my purposes they are plenty good enough. I'd prefer to stay with the 6.X release for now. I've got a lot of Mac's around running OS X but in this case these boxes would be headless and without keyboards. An alternate serial console would be nice if that can be rigged up via USB and a serial converter. IJ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: vinum stability?
One thing you might consider is that gvinum is quite flexible. The subdisks in vinum that make up a raid 5 plex are partitions. This means you can create raid 5 sets without using each entire disk and the disks don't need to be the same model or size. It's also handy for spares. If you start having media errors a new partition on the offending disk might be one option but any other disk that support a partition size equal to the ones used as subdisks in the raid 5 plex will also do. Having said that I'm finding it tricky to understand and use gvinum. It seems to be on the mend though, the documentation is improving and the raid 5 set I had running seemed pretty stable for a 40 minute iozone benchmark. That's all I've done with it to date. IJ On Jul 6, 2006, at 8:56 AM, Jeremy Ehrhardt wrote: I have a quad-core Opteron nForce4 box running 6.1-RELEASE/amd64 with a gvinum RAID 5 setup comprising six identical SATA drives on three controllers (the onboard nForce4 SATA, which is apparently two devices, and one Promise FastTrak TX2300 PCI SATA RAID controller in IDE mode), combined into one volume named drugs. We've been testing this box as a file server, and it usually works fine, but smartd reported a few bad sectors on one of the drives, then a few days later it crashed while I was running chmod -R on a directory on drugs and had to be manually rebooted. I can't figure out exactly what happened, especially given that RAID 5 is supposed to be robust against single drive failures and that despite the bad blocks smartctl claims the drive is healthy. I have three questions: 1: what's up with gvinum RAID 5? Does it crash randomly? Is it considered stable? Will it lose data? 2: am I using a SATA controller that has serious problems or something like that? In other words, is this actually gvinum's fault? 3: would I be better off using a different RAID 5 system on another OS? Jeremy Ehrhardt [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gvinum question: why are subdisks not attached?
Howdy, On Jun 26, 2006, at 9:39 AM, Travis H. wrote: Hiya, I finally resolved the source of my gvinum problems. Every time I reboot, the plexes and volumes come up attached to one another, but both are size zero and the subdisks exist but are not attached. Has anyone a guess about the source of this problem? One possibility is your partition type. I'm not certain. (see below on my bsdlabel output sample) I was working on a Raid5 configuration and finally did get it working. I have a few suggestions. One is to try to find to find old vinum documentation. What finally brought clarity to me is looking at the vinum man pages from FreeBSD 4.7. It has a lot more information vinum(8), including a nice section on the config file format and examples. Of course I could have just missed it (nope just checked again). The second is to try marking your partitions as type vinum. The third is to drop the slices since the configuration that worked for my Raid 5 set used just partitions no slices (see below). The fourth is to move up to 6.1. I did this during my struggles but I don't think that was my issue. However 6.1 does have improved man pages :-), but not as good as the 4.7 pages. You have to read both because gvinum doesn't implement the full vinum command set. I *think* the config file is the same though. # /dev/ad4: # same as /dev/ad8 and /dev/ad10 for a Raid 5 3-disk system. 8 partitions: #size offsetfstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] a: 390721952 16unused0 0 c: 3907219680unused0 0 # raw part, don't edit d: 209715200 vinum Finally, enough people have been able to get/claim vinum success to make me believe it's OK. There are two key issues in my mind. I'll add that now that I found TFM I can RTFM. ;-) #1 it is a little fragile (ie not idiot proof enough yet for this hack) #2 the documentation needs some work ... but that's kind of up to us now isn't it... I think I owe Freebsd-docs a long post but I have another 20 hours of understanding and playing to do at least. This is a great capability for small systems. Frankly I'm a bit puzzled by geom and why the change was made from whatever it replaced. Overall 6.x looks like a step backwards from a filesystem management perspective... maybe someone could comment on geom... perhaps a future enabler? Ian ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
moving gvinum raid 5 volume between systems
Could anyone offer some guidance on how under 6.1 I can move 3 gvinum disks from one system to another. There is an old post http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2004-August/ 054607.html That covers pretty much what I am doing. In my case I have 6.1 i386 and 6.1 AMD64 versions of FreeBSD on one machine. I'd like to be able to mount the same raid 5 set on either OS. IJ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Torn between SCSI and SATA for RAID
I'd rather run 5 SATA cables then one SCSI cable (say 68pin) with multiple heads... The darn SCSI cables are so thick, comparatively, that running them in your case is a lot harder :-) Well everyone's mileage may vary. Parallel cables only work nicely when you have a stack of drives all close lined up together. I personally yearn for a simple 40gbps daisychainable serial bus. I hoped firewire would have been it but we seem to be stuck at 800mpbs. The other cabling option I forgot about is USB2 or Firewire. There are a number of very low cost external cases that pre-package USB/Firewire SATA converters. You basically fill a hard disk case with SATA or ATA drives and connect your computer to the case via a single firewire or USB cable. I have not seen one of these that's hot swap yet but I did see a few of these recently in Tokyo Akihabara district for ~$100 so I assume they are available all over. The box's I have seen are 4 drive systems. Just fill them with your favorite commodity hard disk I guess. At ~50MB/s the interface is plenty fast and greatly simplifies the cable issue inside the PC. IJ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Torn between SCSI and SATA for RAID
Hi Chris, I have many of the same questions. SATA is plenty fast for home systems and modern drives are smoking stuff that was enterprise class just a few years ago. 'twas ever thus. Cables are a nightmare IMHO. This was by far the reason I've been a big fan of SCSI for a long time. You can make a pretty effective and tidy Raid system by custom making a short length daisy chain scsi cable. I have not explored this recently but used to do this ~5+ years ago for non-raid applications. We used to run into device compatibility problems on the SCSI bus though so same drive mfg might be a good idea. Perhaps things have improved. You can buy old 80 pin 16 bit SCSI controllers quite reasonably on EBay. Even though the bus speeds might be 40 or 80 MB/sec (that's bytes) this still exceeds what I get on single disk SATA benchmarks. My impression is that modern drives are backward compatible with older SCSI but I've not tested this extensively, just a couple of anecdotes. You can do quite well in the used Enterprise market. You might have a look at pricewatch.com for some low cost SCSI disks. My experience has been that S/P-ATA drives seem to be easily available in large sizes, 300 GB whereas SCSI seems to be available in volume only for smaller drives ~100-200GB. Above is mostly supposition. I have been experimenting with SATA to see what's possible. There are gizmo's, Backplanes, out there that make the cabling issue easier: I have one of these: http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=BA20689 And I'm considering one of these: http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=BA20690 Similar devices are available for SCSI and PATA drives they are a little difficult to find. You can google for backplane, 3X5 and 2X3 that type of thing. I finally got gvinum to work for me under 6.1 i386 RELEASE for Raid 5. The volume manager concept appeals to me because you can work with smaller chunks pieces of storage than whole disks. So with the same set of physical disks you can contemplate different RAID strategies depending on how much performance you want, all at the same time. So far my benchmarks indicate that a 3 partition raid 5 vinum disk performs fine for me. Minimum write performance is around 7MB/s and Minimum read is around 14MB/s. Usually however writes came in on the low side of 15 MB/s and reads around 50 MB/s. This is all just a first attempt though without any attempt to tune the raid set. With two 5X3 backplanes and software Raid 5 you could build PDQ a 4TB system and your drives would not have to be identical. Even with a backplane device though you end up with quite a cable issue. The last option I've considered is to look at some of the SATA to SCSI backplanes. There are commercial solutions that allow you to put SATA or PATA drives up to 12 in an enclosure then connect to your host computer via SCSI. I haven't found anything cheap though. Cheap = 20% of the drive cost. Apple sells such a device as do numerous other manufacturers. Search for SATA Raid. IJ On May 11, 2006, at 7:51 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My questions that I'm posting is not really related towards the performance of the system, it's more towards the capacity of the system... I guess it boils down to the physical hardware... How does everything connect, how to expand systems, and how to run arrays bigger than what one single controller can provide... -- C ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Advice on RAID?
Robert, I think I already sent out this link that documents FreeBSD R5 performance: http://www25.big.or.jp/~jam/filesystem/ I recently saw an article documenting similar benchmarks using geom and vinum in a Japanese FreeBSD magazine and the handbook section around vinum does warn about write performance of Raid 5. For lot's of applications though the Raid 5 low write performance is not an issue. (it's not an issue for me) Were you able to get gvinum raid 5 working? Could you share that experience? I'd really like to use gvinum or raid 5 with a 3 SATA drive, + 2IDE drive setup but so far I have not been able to get it to work. :-( IJ On May 12, 2006, at 6:35 AM, Robert Fitzpatrick wrote: I have looked into and tried FreeBSD 6.0 Vinum and GEOM RAID in our PIII SCSI 80-pin server with the help of several here on the list. I'm pretty much going to use GEOM RAID-1 for the system disks using Ralf's doc. I have room for 3 more disks. Would you recommend using Vinum RAID-5 on three 73GB drives or using GEOM RAID-1 again on 2 147GB drives? If there is no big reason to use either over the other, we've decided to go for the most space and RAID-5. But the amount of space we would be gaining is probably less than 50GB, correct? Or do you have another solution on our $700 budget. It is a debate here and would like to get experienced insight. Thanks in advance for your time! -- Robert ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Software RAID guidance
I have been uable to get vinum to work under 6.0. I'm no expert though. Vinum became gvinum in 6.0 and is implemented using geom. Recently the gvinum man page has been updated and it available in 6.1 RC-1. I think if you want mirroring only you should consult the geom pages. It seems as though geom is the way of the future but does not currently support R5 which is what I was looking for. Somewhere out there is a pretty comprehensive set of iozone benchmarks comparing linux and BSD software Raid. Ah found it: http://www25.big.jp/~jam/filesystem/old/ This might give you some ideas. On Thu, 4 May 2006, Robert Fitzpatrick wrote: I have an old NT4 PIII here that has a pair Adaptec Array1000 Family controllers with 2 pairs of identical drives on one of them (2 IBM 9GB and 2 Seagate 35GB). From what I googled, *nix does not support the controller, so I have removed the RAID arrays and loaded FreeBSD 6.0 onto the two IBM drives. Now, I wanted to mirror the other two for data and looking for guidance as to whether it is first of all suited for software RAID and if so, CCD or vinum. I am contemplating vinum because the handbook mentions CCD is when cost is the important factor and for me, is reliability. What would someone suggest? If vinum, one thing I don't quite understand is do I create the partitions to be used in the device? There doesn't seem to be a man for gvinum and the link to it in the handbook section 19.6.1 is broken. Thanks in advance. -- Robert ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Problem creating DR bootable disk
I just moved my 6.0 Release from one slice to another. The procedure is similar. You could look at my response to expanding a partition, same idea. So relocating a copy of 6.0 (at least) works OK for booting. What happens when you pull the raid card? I'm guessing that bios is ignored pretty early in the boot processs. Your disks might get renumbered somehow. Choice of boot manager? IJ On Fri, 28 Apr 2006, Joe Gross wrote: I'm running FreeBSD 6.1-RC #0 with a generic kernel and an Asus A8V motherboard. I have three IDE disks in my system. Two are on a 3ware 7200 RAID card in a RAID1 configuration. This is currently used to boot. The third disk is intended to be a DR disk, with a nightly script to mount, sync, change twed0 to ad0 in fstab, and unmount. If something untoward would happen to the main RAID, I could simply reset the boot list in the BIOS and boot off the DR disk that has an image from early that morning. This is also a handy way to shuffle the OS onto larger disks as I upgrade. I was using this in 4.10 with an Asus a7v133 board and fortunately never had to utilize the DR capability. It did pass tests for booting off the new disk and I did several disk upgrade shuffles over the years. For 4.10 the script I used to initialize the DR disk and add boot blocks was: #!/bin/sh dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=1k count=1 fdisk -BI ad0 disklabel -B -w -r ad0s1 auto disklabel -R -r ad0s1 disklabel.250 disklabel -B -r ad0s1 newfs -U -i 20480 /dev/ad0s1a This doesn't work with 6.0. When I try to boot off the secondary disk it gets through the initial loader and then spews what looks like a repeating register dump. Nothing short of a power cycle will kill it. I can't say exactly what it says since it's scrolling too fast to read. Everything I've read indicates the procedure hasn't changed in 6.0. Any suggestions on where to look or what to try? Thanks for the help, Joe ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Problem creating DR bootable disk
Hmmm I'm probably making obvious suggestions but... I think I'd be inclined to do a fresh install of the same OS version on the target disk. See if that boots OK. If it does then something in your mirror tools is the issue. If it doesn't then it's a bootstrap problem. Re: boot manager I'm not a bootstrap expert but I was thinking that grub seems pretty flexible and might help out in this case. I have not installed it with FreeBSD but I have it on a FreeDOS/Linux machine. There are others also. IJ On Apr 29, 2006, at 5:56 PM, Joe Gross wrote: On Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 04:08:36AM -0400, Ian Jefferson wrote: What happens when you pull the raid card? Same thing. Choice of boot manager? Doesn't the -B option just install the standard boot manager? Joe ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How do you resize an existing partition / slice ?
If you have extra disk space it's fairly straightforward to use dump/ restore and re-partition. I recently found myself desiring to re-slice my disk from a single slice to 5 slices. The basics were to dump the contents of my root, var, and usr partitions to 3 files on another disk. I booted from a distribution CD and installed a new OS on slice 2 with the default partitions. Slice 1 became a 1g partition for DOS if the urge struck me later, Slice 2 was a new OS and slice 3 was for the old/existing OS. I relabeled my 2nd slice and restored the original OS to the various partitions. The only thing I forgot was to re-name the partitions in the /etc/fstab on my old OS. The change in slice number went like this: /dev/ad0s1b noneswapsw 0 0 /dev/ad0s1a / ufs rw 1 1 /dev/ad0s1e /tmpufs rw 2 2 /dev/ad0s1f /usrufs rw 2 2 /dev/ad0s1d /varufs rw 2 2 Became /dev/ad0s3b noneswapsw 0 0 /dev/ad0s3a / ufs rw 1 1 /dev/ad0s3e /tmpufs rw 2 2 /dev/ad0s3f /usrufs rw 2 2 /dev/ad0s3d /varufs rw 2 2 In your case if you want just the original slice you would do something like: boot from the live filesystem CD fdisk your drive, label (partition) your drive to the configuration you want newfs each new partition, mount the drive you used for backup mount each of the new partitions of your original disk Restore each of the partitions in turn. Reboot from the original disk. This looks a bit complex but is not too bad at all. This dump/ restore or even tar'ing filesystems is something we used a long time ago to image NeXT systems. It's been quite reliable for me. Your mileage may vary. IJ On Apr 29, 2006, at 3:24 AM, Low Kian Seong wrote: Dear all, Like the subject shows, I would just like to know how do i resize an existing partition or slice, ermm with minimum loss of data of course. Thanks. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
gvinum help under 6.0 release
Hi folks, Well I think I'm out of ideas in my experience with gvinum. I need some help. I cannot get gvinum to work for me at all in setting up a raid5 set. This is the first FreeBSD gizmo that I've run into that has proven dangerously unreliable. Each time I use it I get a panic, and one of these tries kept the machine from booting until I did a bsdlabel -B /dev/adxx for each of three drives. (it just did it again) I was surprised that even a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adxx would not clean up things. I read somewhere that geom does something preventing overwrite of parts of the device. I'm hoping someone will point out something I'm doing horribly wrong. Synopsis: The drives in question are ad4, ad8 and ad10 all identical disks. One attempt under amd64 6.0 release with this gvinum patch I get panics with i386 6.1-RC1 http://wikitest.freebsd.org/moin.cgi/GvinumMoveRename bsd2# cat vinum_r5.config drive a device /dev/ad4s1d drive b device /dev/ad8s1d drive c device /dev/ad10s1d volume r5vol plex org raid5 15g sd length 5g drive a sd length 5g drive b sd length 5g drive c bsd2# cat sdisk.bsdlabel # for vinum configuraiton # good for /dev/ad4s1 /dev/ad8s1 and /dev/ad10s1 # # # /dev/ad4s1: 8 partitions: #size offsetfstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] a: 390721889 16unused0 0 c: 3907219050unused0 0 # raw part, don't edit d: 50g 17vinum bsd2# cat clean.sh dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 bs=1k count=100 fdisk -I ad4 bsdlabel -R /dev/ad4s1 sdisk.bsdlabel dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad8 bs=1k count=100 fdisk -I ad8 bsdlabel -R /dev/ad8s1 sdisk.bsdlabel dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad10 bs=1k count=100 fdisk -I ad10 bsdlabel -R /dev/ad10s1 sdisk.bsdlabel The story so far: I recently purchased a Gigabyte GA-8VT880P (VIA PT880 Pro Chipset) and put an Intel Celeron D 336 (Intel EMB64T) processor in it. I suppose by today's standards this is a pretty low end board but it's way fast for what I need. On this system the MB was replacing an older AMD Athalon board. I'm using this system to study an upgrade path to a 4.7 system I'm running. I stupidly decided to install the 6.0-RELEASE amd64. At this point I'm still running the Generic kernel. I say stupidly because the target system is really going to run an i386-RELEASE of 5.x or 6.x. Later I repented, after gvinum frustration, re-sliced and moved my original install onto slice 2. For disk I have to PATA drives that I have been using for some time and 3 Samsung SATA drives. All but one of the drives is attached to the MB controller. I have an addon Buffalo SATA/PATA card (also ~cheap) with a VT6421L chipset in it. I'll comment that one of the SATA connections on the addon board does not seem to function correctly with the amd release. I have not tested it yet with my i386 RC-1 yet. HOWEVER I did run some default iozone tests on all the working SATA and PATA drives so I'm fairly confident that this the working SATA connection really works OK. I also have a SATA backplane. These are called various things but the basic idea is to put three 3.5 drives in two 5.25 HH external slots. This one has hot swap capability (dubious IMHO). For me this is a convenient mechanical place to put disks. Again I'm confident that this is OK since I ran the iozone tests with the drives in this enclosure. What I am trying to do: What I'm studying is how to put together a software raid5 volume and generally I like what I was reading about vinum as a flexible tool to manage space. I'm not terribly concerned with IO performance since I'm still calibrated to 5MB/s sustained throughput and keep wondering why 2kb of code keeps getting repacked into 35MB's of bloat. (see grumble) above :-). TIA ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
